Team Roos, secret of the Swans'success success

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Family first Paul Roos in Melbourne yesterday with the
"players" who matter - his wife, Tami, and their sons, Tyler, 9,
(left) and Dylan, 11.Photo: Dallas Kilponen

Perhaps Paul Roos has learned that the club means more when it
doesn't mean everything.

The Swans coach will wake this morning in a Melbourne hotel with
his wife, Tami, and their sons, Dylan, 11, and Tyler, 9 - his
family together as they nearly always are, regardless of the myriad
demands on his time and attention. And demands do not come much
bigger than those awaiting Roos today: his first grand final as a
coach, and only the third of his life since he started playing
Australian football as a child.

So he will wake, and then he and Tami will meditate, finding
calm at the centre of a sporting storm that should define his life
yet somehow does not. For that, he can partly thank a marriage that
has broadened his horizons, to a woman who knows what comes first.
"If it ever got in the way of the family," Tami Roos says, "we'd
give it away."

The "we" is important. The Rooses are a team, the boys included.
And while it would be trite to say that the oft noted special
spirit of the Swans makes it the "family club", it is fair to
observe that the things that make the Roos household tick also
inform the coach's methods at the club, and account for some of its
success. Bonds of deep loyalty are the hallmark of both; Swans and
family are intertwined.

"When Paul said we're all in this together, he really meant it,"
his wife says.

Their love story has come a long way. They met in 1988. She was
a pretty blonde student living in San Diego, he a dark and handsome
footballer on an end-of- season trip, although he did not tell her
that at first. He insisted he was a professional surfer. By the
time Paul Roos was heading home he had come clean. Tami did not
know what to believe. And she had never heard of Australian rules
football.

But as it happened, she and a girlfriend had already planned a
trip to Australia and New Zealand the following year. "When you get
there, look me up," Roos said. "Just call the Fitzroy Football Club
and they'll find me."

She did, and Tami Hardy discovered Australian football. She
remembers two things: she had never been so cold. And there was
anarchy on the field. "I remember saying: 'This game has no
rules,"' she said.

Nor does life. The romance presented a quandary when she
returned to the US. After completing a degree in international
business, she contemplated travelling before taking on an MBA.

But in September 1989 Roos called and told her he was returning
for another end-of-season visit. Her fate was settled, and his took
a new turn.

Before they married in 1992 in California, Fitzroy allowed their
champion to do his pre-season training in the US, and when Roos
took his wife to a new life in Australia he made her a promise:
when he retired they would spend a year in America.

In 1995 Roos joined the Swans, happy to head north after his
years at Fitzroy. Roos admits he did not know what to expect - and
he was shocked. There was "no [AFL] footy news, no one kicking the
footy in the parks, and no one really knowing much about the Swans
or the game".

The team won eight games that year. The following year, 1996,
they made the grand final, losing to North Melbourne. Roos had
planned to retire at the end of 1997. He stayed on one more year,
then kept his word to Tami.

In 1998 the family left Australia. "He kept that promise and I
think it made the transition for him a lot easier," Tami says. "No
one really understands how hard retirement is from professional
sport until you go through it."

The family spent 1999 in the US. Roos had turned down a series
of assistant coaching positions in Australia, but there were other
dreams to follow. In the US he conducted coaching clinics and
worked for Channel Seven, covering major sporting events in the US
and Europe. "With the exception of the US Masters golf he saw
everything he had ever wanted to see," Tami says.

And yet she knew there were unfulfilled ambitions. "My heart
always told me Paul wanted to coach. He never seemed sure it would
happen, but I knew it was what he had to try."

When they returned to Sydney he was offered a part-time,
assistant coaching job with the Swans. It then became full-time,
and when the coach Rodney Eade resigned midway through 2002 Roos
was given the job.

It seemed he had been preparing for it for years. When he
retired four years earlier he had made notes in preparation for
just this moment. If he did become a coach there were a few things
he wanted to remember. Coaches, he believed, would sometimes forget
what it was like being a player.

Most of the things on the list, he says, are "pretty basic and
pretty private and I haven't let out too many of them, but I think
it's just helped me understand the player group. Being positive is
one of the things I wrote on there."

And always there is his family to ground him. After the West
Coast-Sydney qualifying final, Roos flew home to Sydney in time for
Dylan's grand final. On Brownlow night last Monday Mr and Mrs Roos
did not attend the Swans dinner. They were at Woollahra Public
School, watching their sons in the school concert.

"We put so much focus into the Swans, I don't want [the boys] to
ever think that what they do is diminished," Tami says.

Roos's sons are devoted; ditto his players. It is said his
greatest asset is that his players are willing to put everything on
the line for him. As Michael O'Loughlin puts it: "Every individual
player seems to have a bond with Roosy."

Roos responds: "I think the philosophy that the coach has to
have a lot of distance between the players and himself is an
antiquated [one]. I'm not suggesting you have to be best mates with
the players, but as long as you're honest and upfront with them. I
just try to be myself and treat them with respect. That they want
to play hard for me, that's probably one of the greatest
compliments a player group can give a coach."